BIFF 2011: TWO IN THE WAVE review

Beautifully structured and produced,
stuffed with satisfying little nuggets of information on the
partnership between legendary directors Francois Truffaut and
Jean-Luc Godard, Emmanuel Laurent's Two In The Wave is a great example of how to put
together a populist documentary on a fairly highbrow subject. It
doesn't go for any especially incisive analysis, plus it's a little
too obvious - as a French production - the film is falling over
itself to paint its subjects and their friendship as part tragic
martyrs, part national heroes, part history of two modern-day saints.
Still, even for those with little or no interest in their output,
it's a hugely entertaining and ultimately surprisingly moving watch.

Bookended by the final shot from
Truffaut's famous debut 400 Blows (it doesn't spoil anything, for the
wary) Two In The Wave properly gets under way with the film's
rapturous reception at Cannes 1959. Hailed as a reinvention of a
national cinema Truffaut and Godard's generation felt had grown stale
and hidebound under an autocratic critical system, it dominated
newspaper headlines and discussion in the renowned magazine Cahiers
Du Cinema. Writing for Cahiers, Truffaut had upset the establishment
so much he was banned from Cannes 1958 - now, a year later, he was
the festival's golden boy.

Truffaut went on to help Godard, whose
work was also published in Cahiers, to stardom with his own debut,
Breathless. Using his new-found fame to convince producer Georges
Beauregard to take a chance on the script, the resulting feature also
made cinematic history as between them, the two men became the
catalyst that launched the New Wave in French cinema. Both films were
hailed as the epitome of cool - Breathless in a more literal sense,
the first film to come up with a perfect encapsulation of a younger
generation in thrall to Americana yet, through that adulation,
voicing a need for change their elders could never quite understand.

But what we'd think of as the backlash
against the New Wave kicked in surprisingly fast as the cinema-going
public began to find it confusing, even alienating. While the
movement became steadily more influential it was increasingly obvious
it wasn't about to tear down the established order overnight. Both
men's follow-ups failed to live up to people's expectations.
Truffaut's experimental gangster flick Shoot The Piano Player flopped
at the box office and Godard's The Little Soldier, dealing with
French military involvement in Algeria, was banned by the government
for several years.

While each began to move in different
directions from this point on - Godard fiercely dedicated to
advancing his philosophical and political beliefs, Truffaut the more
reflective cineaste - what really drove a wedge between them was
the famous May 1968 protest movement, when millions of workers took
to the streets in protest at the policies of Charles de Gaulle's
government. Both directors marched alongside their contemporaries,
but these events resonated far more with Godard, who decided from
that point on there was little or no worth in cinema that didn't
consciously stand up behind an issue, be it political, moral or
anything else.

The cracks in their friendship widened
until the point Godard, after walking out of Truffaut's love letter
to the film-maker's craft in 1973's Day For Night, wrote to the other
man accusing him of living a lie. Truffaut fired back a furious
twenty-page letter effectively attacking Godard as a hypocrite and a
walking caricature, blind to the way his radical polemics appeared to
everyone else. It seemed they'd never speak again, and Truffaut's
death in 1984 ensured they never would.

Two In The Wave doesn't go out of its
way to provide any deep, objective look at either director's
worldview. The film is largely a linear narrative moving steadily
from one era to the next, and more of an elegy for lost youth than an
attempt to lay blame in any sense. Its unfettered adulation for its
subjects is amusingly over-the-top, at times, and though the lack of
talking heads is to its credit it doesn't seem quite sure what to use
instead. Throwing Isild LeBesco in to page silently through yellowing
issues of Cahiers Du Cinema and old newspaper headlines seems fairly
superfluous.

But other than that Two In The Wave is
hard to fault. It mines a wealth of archive materials from the
period, from the moment it kicks off with The 400 Blows at Cannes. We
see the two men and their entourage holding court, on top of the
world; interviews with ordinary Parisians coming out of the cinema
after being confronted with Breathless for the first time; footage of
the 1968 demonstrations, even Godard angrily denouncing the film
industry as a sham at Cannes that same year. Clips from many of their
most important features are thrown in to illustrate the evolution of
each man's body of work.

More importantly, even though Two In
The Wave views Godard and Truffaut's friendship from something of a
remove, it does so with more than enough grace and even-handedness
it's impossible to remain unmoved regardless of whether or not you've
seen any of their films. Starting with the genesis of The 400 Blows
and Breathless establishes just how much they meant to each other at
the beginning of the movement, and it's gently reinforced by a
wonderful sequence towards the end showing how each arguably still
influenced the other even once they'd stopped talking.

Two In The
Wave also manages to convey a great deal of pathos by its portrayal
of Jean-Pierre Léaud, who got his start playing Antoine Doinel, the
14-year-old lead in The 400 Blows, as tugged between the two men like
a child between two parents. Truffaut revisited Doinel at different
stages of his life in three more films after that, yet Léaud
continued to work with Godard even while the two directors began to
fall out. It's a melodramatic narrative device, but an effective one
nonetheless, and winding up with the young Léaud's original audition
is sure to leave more than a few in the audience misty-eyed.

Ultimately, Two In The Wave is simply a
great, great story more than a historical document (though it does a
fine job of that, too). While the film could have taken a less
rose-tinted look at the bond between two industry legends, the craft
and attention to detail here mean even though Two In The Wave never
questions either man's importance, such unquestioning respect still
manages to say something emotional, even genuinely profound. Unless
you have a pathological aversion to the French New Wave and its
legacy, consider this one strongly recommended.

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Jim Tudor
•
April 30, 2011 12:49 AM

I found this documentary to be very frustrating, and a missed opportunity. I think the director had a hard time finding sufficient b-roll for certain passages, and man does it show. (Enough with the newspapers already!) There were nuggets of interesting info, but nothing mindblowingly new for the already initiated. An unfortunately problematic doc that left me wishing that someone would create a huge sprawling look at the entire French New Wave movement proper. (And I know that was not the intent for this film, with it's two-director focus and all, but that's nonetheless what I came away with...)